Category: Video

As the game gets closer to release, it’s time to start dividing my time between marketing as well as development. So much has changed since the last time I did that with a new game (it was 1999), but one obvious difference is that games have trailers.

So here’s ours:

This is a “teaser trailer,” which to me means there are no spoilers about the story. That was a pretty big constraint on selecting art and game play, but I think I managed to get a good selection of artwork in.

My design phase also tried to embrace the fact that the game is very different from the typical game on the market. So the trailer needed to stand out a little, while still being a decent video. This meant no gratuitous animation (lots of trailers these days seem to add animation to static images) and avoiding the portentous announcer voice many trailers have.

Rather than get good at video editing, I found someone who could do that. One thing I did have to figure out was how to actually distribute the video. “Upload to YouTube” isn’t necessarily as simple as saying it, and YouTube has changed things so that it’s hard to annotate the video with clickable links. (That’s why it helps to subscribe to our YouTube channel, which will let us level up and enable that.) My impression is that YouTube is not at all oriented to game developers (as opposed to game players who want to share their play sessions).

As usual, the product went through several refinements, including QA noticing artifacts in the voiceover track.

It’s nice to be able to show a little more of the game, and it’s going to make it easier to work on the next videos.